Best performance we've seen from an enterprise-level solid-state drive (SSD). Comprehensive protection of data from power failure.

Cons

Expensive. Less over-provisioning than some other enterprise SSDs.

Bottom Line

The Toshiba HK3R Series (480GB) is a high-end solid-state drive (SSD) with a focus on enterprise. It doesn't skimp on performanceor data protection.

When Toshiba bought OCZ Technologies earlier this year, it wasted no time rolling out a new set of high-end solid-state drives (SSDs). The new HK3R series of SSDs isn't meant for the average consumer; rather, it's targeted toward the enterprise segment. The Toshiba HK3R Series (480GB) ($648), a SATA SSD, is the fastest enterprise drive we've ever testedand one with some fascinating data protection mechanisms. The HK3R series includes on-board capacitors and firmware protections designed to ensure data in-flight is never lost, even in the event of power failure. This type of advanced protection, combined with blistering performance, is why the HK3R Series (480GB) has earned our Editors' Choice award for enterprise-class SSDs.

The HK3R Series we reviewed is a 480GB SSD, but it is also available in 120GB and 240GB capacities, priced at $184 and $336, respectively.

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One of the significant concerns enterprise users have when using NAND flash storage is whether or not the drives are susceptible to data corruption in the event of power failure. To address that concern, Toshiba has baked two kinds of power protection into the drivePower Failure Management (PFM) and Power Loss Protection (PLP). PFM describes Toshiba's firmware-level response to power loss, while PLP refers to the additional supercapacitors Toshiba includes inside the drive itself.

If the SSD detects that drive power has dropped below a predefined level, the SSD automatically transfers power draw to the supercapacitors on the SSD itself. While these only have enough power to run the drive for seconds, that's enough time for the drive to copy the data out of the onboard DRAM buffer and safely to the NAND. Meanwhile, the PFM firmware keeps a redundant copy of the page management table (which is essentially where the operating system stores its mappings of virtual addresses to physical addresses) on two physically different NAND chips to ensure it remains in pristine condition. The contents of every data write in progress are retained as wellmeaning that if a write fails halfway through due to power loss, the original information is always kept in a backup location on the drive. Previous states can therefore be restored automatically.

Toshiba notes that data that resides in DRAM is always written back to the SSD within two seconds, which means the window for a power failure to impact SSD reliability is smaller than the maximum amount of time the supercapacitors can run the drive.

Performance
The Seagate 600 Pro, we tested last year is the most direct comparison to the Toshiba HK3R Series. Unlike the Seagate drive, which offers a huge pool of additional storage as a buffer against data failure, the Toshiba drive is more modestSeagate's 400GB SSD actually contains 512GB of NAND flash, while the Toshiba's 480GB drive has 512GB of NAND flash.

The 32GB of NAND over-provisioning on the Toshiba SSD is standard in this class, but if you're worried about drive longevity, the Seagate 600 Pro does have an edge in that area. As NAND wears out, unused blocks from the over-provisioned section are cycled in to replace the dead older blocks. The more replacement NAND a drive carries, the more NAND failures it can tolerate with no degradation of total capacity or performance.

Both drives were tested in Windows 7 with all patches and updates installed. For these enterprise tests, the VDBench enterprise throughput program stands in for our more pedestrian AS-SSD synthetic tests, though we've retained the latter benchmark for testing file-copy speeds. PCMark 7 and PCMark 8 are also used for evaluating storage performance using real-world application traces.

In AS-SSD's file copy tests, the Toshiba HK3R 480GB drive was ahead of its Seagate rival by more than 100MBps in the ISO test, by 93MBps in the Program Files test, and by 10MBps in the Game Files test. These results were mirrored in both PCMark tests, where the Toshiba SSD was 6 percent faster in PCMark 7's storage test and about 1 percent faster in PCMark 8's storage test, though we should note that both PCMark 8 and PCMark 7 have a tendency to compress performance results as a drive's raw data rates increase. That means that the Toshiba SSD will be faster than the Seagate drive in transferring data.

Finally, in VDBench, which we use to test disk read/write performance in enterprise storage scenarios, we saw excellent performance from the HK3R Series (480GB). We tested VDBench with multiple thread settings and queue depths and chose the 4K data size, since that maps directly against the SSD's stated performance characteristics. The Toshiba SSD was fast, blitzing past the Seagate 600 Pro in the sequential reads and writes tests. It was somewhat slower in random single-threaded reads than the Seagate drive, but nearly twice as fast in random writes.

In the 32-thread test, the gap wasn't nearly as large between the two drives, but it was still significant. The Toshiba HK3R was 32 percent faster than the Seagate 600 Pro (363MBps to 273MBps, respectively) in sequential reads, tied for sequential writes (336MBps to 333MBps), and outperformed it by a similar margin in 32-thread sequential reads (363MBps to 272MBps). The Seagate's random-write results with 32 threads were higher than the Toshiba HK3R by 15 percent, but that was a relatively rare win for the Seagate drive on our tests. Overall, the Toshiba HK3R offers superior database performance in both read and write workloadswhile it loses a few specific tests to the Seagate, when it beat that drive on our tests, it tended to beat it soundly.

Conclusion
Overall, the Toshiba HK3R Series (480GB) is certainly the best-performing enterprise SSD we've testsed. The Seagate 600 Pro's additional over-provisioning may still be worth investing in if you have an exceptionally heavy write workload in a product like MySQL, but it's generally overmatched in terms of raw performance. Neither of these drives is inexpensive, but the Toshiba SSD offers the best overall value for your dollar. Its strong performance on our benchmark tests, combined with its comprehensive data protection, make it an excellent all-around solution. All this earns the HK3R Series (480GB) our Editors' Choice for high-end SSDs.

Toshiba HK3R Series (480GB)

Toshiba HK3R Series (480GB)

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